Christopher Hitchens
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” ― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great "While Hitchens supported Israel's right to exist, he was critical of the Israeli government's handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Having long described himself as a socialist and a Marxist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the controversy over The Satanic Verses, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. He later became a liberal hawk and supported the War on Terror, but he had some reservation, such as his characterisation of waterboarding as torture after voluntarily undergoing the procedure."--Sholem Stein |
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Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011) was a British-American author and intellectual.
Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits.
Hitchens was noted for his skill and acerbic wit as a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, he has latterly embraced some right-wing causes, notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the consensus of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he calls "fascism with an Islamic face". He was known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Clinton.
Hitchens was an atheist and antitheist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason. God Is Not Great is his recent best-selling book.
See also
- "Stranger in a Strange Land" The dismay of an honorable man of the left, an article by Hitchens during the aftermath of 9/11
